I work for Red Hat, where I lead JBoss technical direction and research/development. Prior to this I was SOA Technical Development Manager and Director of Standards. I was Chief Architect and co-founder at Arjuna Technologies, an HP spin-off (where I was a Distinguished Engineer). I've been working in the area of reliable distributed systems since the mid-80's. My PhD was on fault-tolerant distributed systems, replication and transactions. I'm also a Professor at Newcastle University and Lyon.

Monday, December 24, 2012

A busy busy year

I'm on holiday and for the first time in about 6 months I have some time to reflect on the past year. And one word sums it up: busy. One way or another work has been tying me up, flying me around, or just consuming my energy. Fortunately I love my work, or I'm sure I'd have suffered a lot more stress than I have. Most of the time work presents problems that I have to solve, and throughout my life I've loved problem solving! And the people I work with are great and friendly too, which helps a lot.

Now what got me to reflecting on the past year was simply when I took a look at what I've blogged about here over the last 12 months. It's not a lot, compared to previous years and yet I had thought it was much more. However, when you take into account the blogs I write on JBoss.org and other articles I write, such as for InfoQ, it starts to make sense. And of course there's twitter: despite my initial reservations about using it, I think this year has been the one where I've really put a lot more effort into being there and tracking what others are saying and doing. I believe there's a correlation between the amount I've tweeted and the reducing in the blogging I've done, at least here.

So what about 2013? Well I've deliberately tried not to think that far ahead, but I already know it promises to be as busy as 2012. Bring it on!

1 comment:

I agree with more tweeting co-relating to less blogging. I've noticed myself doing the same, and I think for many things twitter is just more effective a medium - bite-sized pieces of information for today's attention-challenged audience. I don't think blogs are obsolete though, but less frequent blogging probably means higher quality blogs and higher signal to noise ratio.